Skip to content

Building Lagrange with GCC Clang in Visual Studio via WSL

System Preparation

Install WSL (Windows Subsystem For Linux)

Detailed instructions here.

In short,

  1. Run Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux in PowerShell as administrator
  2. Restart computer
  3. Go to Microsoft Store, search for Ubuntu or other distro and install it. (tested Ubuntu 20 LTS)

Install Unix Libraries

Start Ubuntu (found in Start menu)

To enable Visual Studio - WSL integration

sudo apt install g++ gdb make rsync zip

For clang, run also 

sudo apt install clang

More details here.

If building UI, install further dependencies

sudo apt-get install libglu1-mesa-dev freeglut3-dev mesa-common-dev build-essential libgtk-3-dev xorg-dev

Install CMake

Visual Studio can install CMake for you automatically (a popup will appear) and it will install it into $HOME/.vs/cmake/bin/cmake However, to make sure FetchContent works with direct URL downloads, it seems you have to install CMake into Ubuntu directly via: 

sudo apt-get install cmake
You will have to switch the CMake executable option in CMakeSettings.json (under Advanced) to /usr/bin/cmake or wherever your apt-get installs cmake.

Modify Visual Studio Installation

  1. Go to Add or Remove Programs -> Visual Studio Installer -> Modify
  2. Select your installation More -> Modify
  3. Enable Linux development with C++ and update
  4. Update to latest Visual Studio version for best results.

Install SSH Keys

  1. Install keychain sudo apt-get install keychain
  2. You can copy your windows id_rsa key to ~/.ssh/ or generate a new one
  3. Add this line to .bashrc: 
    eval \`keychain --agents ssh --eval id_rsa\`
  4. Make sure ~/.ssh/id_rsa has chmod 0600

Build Lagrange

Configuration

  1. Clone the repository
  2. Open Visual Studio -> File -> Open Folder -> Open Folder lagrange root folder
  3. Click on Open the CMake Settings Editor
  4. Click on the plus icon, select WSL-Debug or WSL-Release (this will build with GCC)
  5. Ctrl + S or save the file to run CMake
  6. In the CmakeSettings.json editor, you'll be able to select which lagrange modules to build
  7. Save the config file again to generate the project

Selecting Targets

Solution explorer has two views 1. File hierarchy 2. CMake Targets View

Switch to CMake Targets View, navigate to target you want to build, right click Set as Startup Item and build.

Controlling Configuration Step

CMake will run automatically when cache is invalidated. To prevent that go to Tools -> Options -> CMake -> When cache is out of date and select your preferred option.

If you want to trigger configuration step manually, in Cmake Targets View right click Lagrange Project and select Generate Cache

Terminal

Go to Debug -> Linux Console to see the linux terminal.

Bonus: Running UI Window from WSL

Note: WSL does not support GPU rendering, UI will be rendered through software driver - therefore it's quite slow. In particular, IBL generation is slow so setting Viewer::WindowOptions::default_ibl = "" is recommended.

  1. Download and run MobaXTerm (https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/download.html), go to X Server -> Start X Server (other alternatives like Xming use older GLX version)
  2. To test if it works, Run export DISPLAY=:0 and then sudo apt install mesa-utils and run glxgears
  3. OpenCmakeSettings.json in the lagrange project and add this before configurations: 
    "environments": [
    {
      "DISPLAY": ":0"
    }
  ],
  4. Build and run UI examples

More resources